Rescue workers find body of 15th victim at wrecked German rink

STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press

Published 6:30 am, Wednesday, January 4, 2006

BAD REICHENHALL, Germany -- Rescue workers early today recovered the body of a woman believed to be the last person missing in the ruins of a skating rink in this Bavarian resort town, bringing the number of dead to 15.

Three days after the roof collapsed on people enjoying their Christmas break, the body a 40-year-old woman was pulled from the twisted, snow-covered skeleton of steel and wooden beams, fire official Rudi Zeif said.

Rescue teams with search dogs and heavy equipment worked through the night Wednesday to remove debris from the surface of the ice rink before finding the woman.

Earlier today, somber rescuers recovered the bodies of three children, all of whom authorities said appeared to have been killed upon impact of the roof, which gave way under the weight of accumulated heavy, wet snow.

One of the three was identified by police as a girl from Uzbekistan who had been living in the town. All the other victims were local residents. The children's ages were not released.

Hope for another miracle — like the rescue of a 5-year-old girl with only minor injuries the day of the accident — had dwindled by the time teams reached the three bodies.

Pope Benedict XVI, who grew up nearby, sent a message of sympathy to the grieving town.

Some 50 people were inside Reichenhall's ice rink when the roof collapsed Monday during a heavy snowfall. Many of them were children on the last days of Christmas vacation from school. Eighteen people were injured seriously enough to be hospitalized.

One of the survivors, teenager Phillipp Woerz said he and a friend had arrived at the rink minutes before the accident and were told it would be closing soon. Still, they laced up their skates and made for the ice.

"Suddenly we hear a loud crack," Woerz told n-tv television. "My friend turned to me and said as a joke, 'Watch out, the whole place is going to cave in on us.'"

Seconds later, that is exactly what happened.

"All I know is there was a very loud bang, and I don't know any more than that. I can't remember," Elfriede Datzsaid, a teenage survivor, told N24 television from her hospital bed.

Rescuers worked in stages, clearing larger pieces of wreckage with heavy equipment, then sending in teams with dogs trained to detect buried victims. Then more workers entered the shaky ruins, digging with shovels and their hands and removing debris with wheelbarrows.

The work had to be halted from Tuesday night until early Wednesday morning when part of the fallen roof began shifting, prompting authorities to bring in new equipment to lift the huge crossbeams.

Prosecutors said an investigation into possible negligence was under way, amid angry questions from residents about how heavy but predictable snowfall apparently caused the building to collapse.

Workers marked large sections of wreckage with numbers and letters in red paint before removing them to help investigators reconstruct what happened. Prosecutors said they were interviewing witnesses and seeking documents in what promised to be a long probe.

Questions were raised because city officials had ordered the rink closed at the end of Monday's public skate. They said the snow weight was measured and found to be well within the safety limit, and the closing was a precaution because it still was snowing.

Residents also said there had been discussions about renovating the building, but city officials said the only discussions were on upgrading the pool and heating equipment at the recreation complex. The political parties that make up the city council issued a statement defending the city's conduct.

"Safety-related defects were not evident" during officials' discussions on the building, the statement said. "If the town council had had any indication of safety defects it would not have been considering repairs but rather the immediate closure of the facility."

Hubert Widmann, a structural engineer with the State Business Institute in Munich, said the snow load could not have exceeded the maximum, according to measurements from his institute's office in the area.

"I think it's not right to put it all on the snow," he said.

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The pope, a Bavaria native who grew up in Traunstein, about 20 miles away, sent his condolences to Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, the archbishop of the Bavarian capital, Munich.